DataDirect Networks Launches WOS 360

Posted on March 05, 2014 By Pedro Hernandez

DataDirect Networks, a Chatsworth, Calif.-based provider of Big Data storage systems, today unveiled a new version company's Big Data-friendly Web Object Scaler (WOS) platform. The product, dubbed WOS 360, is designed to help organizations better manage and protect the flood of unstructured data produced by sensors, social media, mobile devices and cloud-enabled workloads.

WOS is DataDirect Networks' global object storage platform, which according to the company, can handle billions of reads/writes and scale into the trillion-file range, courtesy of its underlying NoFS (No File System) architecture. The software, along with the company's Object Storage Appliance hardware, can retrieve up to 256 million objects per second with sub-50 millisecond latency. Throughput performance is rated at up to 10 terabytes per second.

WOS 360 aims to provide a more holistic storage management experience that can span across data centers. To support this vision, the company has enhanced the platform's data protection capabilities. These include a new version of the company's policy-based ObjectAssure erasure coding technology.

New in WOS 360, Global ObjectAssure provides multi-site, distributed erasure coding capabilities that enable local and global data protection. The feature "is designed for use cases in which low network overhead and high levels of data durability are key decision criteria," said the company in a statement.

To lower the cost of long-term data storage, DataDirect Networks introduced the WOS Archive Node. Working in tandem with Global ObjectAssure, Archive Node "helps drive down costs of the object storage environment even further," boasted the company.

In a blog post, Tom Leyden, product marketing director for DataDirect Networks, noted in a blog post that, increasingly in the enterprise, transactional data is giving way to "unstructured, Internet of Things data." Object storage solutions from other vendors have emerged -- a field that includes IBM, Dell, Amplidata and SGI -- but they're not all created equal he argues.

Leyden asserted that WOS 360 is "the market's first true and truly complete object storage platform designed to enable companies to build a highly reliable, infinitely scalable and most efficient storage pool for all their unstructured data needs, and aimed to deliver on the promise of object storage."

WOS 360 is shipping now with limited availability. The product will enter general availability by the end of March 2014.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.